Sociopolitical changes reorganize society, not the biological brain itself

Evidence

The analogy between cerebral organization and socioeconomic organization should thus, at the very least, lead us to an awareness of the relation between the subject and his brain. Abandoning the thesis of a rigid, predetermined, directing organ for the thesis of a supple, adaptable, plastic organ permits the political emancipation of the brain, the transition from a ”soviet” to a ”liberal” brain. But what is the consequence of this conceptual reversal for each individual? The brain itself has not changed. Humans in the Middle Ages, the Industrial Revolution, and the liberal revolution all have had the same brain, with the same capacities for learning and adaptation. What changes is the organization of society, the outcome of organizational forces and macroscopic interactions over which the brain has little influence. Thus the problem is, rather, that of understanding how an individual brain can respond to the challenges of its social environment. — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 21

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The ‘soviet to liberal brain’ move — declaring the brain plastic while noting the brain itself has not changed — is a genuinely dense pivot: plasticity rhetoric gets political credit for a biological constancy, forcing the reader to hold both claims at once.
• XREF: Core to the reader’s task: confirms that within this passage the brain-society analogy is asserted (shift from rigid to plastic organ mapped onto political regimes), so the reader can mark where the analogy is argued vs asserted. — connects to: ADHD and dyslexia are pathologies of late capitalist control circuits — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 54
• QUESTION: If the brain never changed across regimes, why does the plastic-brain metaphor capture a ‘political emancipation’ that is really about social organization? Worth chasing how the metaphor migrates blame/credit onto individuals.